“Unlike Sisyphus, we are not bound by chains or curses. We push the rock not because we must but because we lack the courage to let it crush us.” A deep dive into the fragility of identity, the illusions we create about ourselves, and the existential void beneath our personal narratives…
by: Titoxz
I
Consider a lunatic king or a president plagued by delusions of grandeur. A leader who whispers to ghosts or communes with invisible gods is not labeled insane if their delusions serve power. Their madness becomes charisma, their paranoia policy. What is foresight but deranged vision, cast in a glow of authority? And what are we, the masses, if not believers in the shared illusion? Sanity itself is a currency minted by the powerful, and those who control its flow dictate who wears the crown of genius and who the yoke of madness.
Take Joan of Arc, a peasant girl who claimed divine voices ordered her to lead France to salvation. In today’s world, those voices wouldn’t lead her to the battlefield — they’d lead her to a psychiatric ward. Earning her a medical diagnosis: psychotic, delusional, unfit for the world of reason. She would be sedated into subordination, her visions sterilized by antipsychotics, her spiritual fire smothered beneath the clinical cold of institutional care. But in her time, her madness fit the mold of prophecy. Her voices were not divine, they were convenient. They aligned with the ambitions of desperate men, and in their desperation, her hallucinations carved victory into blood-soaked soil. Her sainthood wasn’t sanctity, it was strategy.
Strip away the context, and what remains? Madness. Perhaps that is all prophecy has ever been: delusion spoken at the right time, in the right place, by the right mouth.
But prophecy is not the privilege of saints alone. Every society operates under its own brand of madness, wrapped in the comforting guise of consensus. Morality, economy, faith — these are not truths but fictions, trembling on the edge of the chaos. We build scaffolds to bridge the void, and yet none dare look down for fear of vertigo — an existential vertigo that nauseates to the core. Civilization, we are told, is progress. But in truth, it is a distraction, a collective theater where suffering plays both prologue and epilogue, and all our acts of progress are fleeting follies between.
Take money and time, two of humanity’s grandest illusions. Money, a sacred delusion we’ve all agreed to believe. Worthless scraps of paper conjure empires, topple dynasties, and dictate human worth. We would kill, starve, and sell our souls for it — not because it’s real, but because we’ve decided it should be. And then there’s time — the most exquisite fabrication of all. A man-made illusion crafted to make sense of the senseless. We slice it, measure it, fear its passing, and bind ourselves to its ticking tyranny as if it were a law of nature rather than our own desperate invention. Shouldn’t we all be diagnosed with collective schizophrenia for treating them as divine?
Law, that shining monument to order, is nothing but violence dressed in robes of neutrality, ensuring the powerful remain unchallenged. Economics, with its calculus of growth and decay, is a shared hallucination of tokens, promises, and trust. And religion? Religion is a circus of cosmic storytelling — a pageant of sweet lies whispered in the shadow of death. Are these systems real? Only as real as Joan’s celestial command. Only as enduring as the lungs of those who believe in them.
We worship and abide by these constructs not because they are immutable but out of terror — terror of confronting the yawning emptiness beneath our feet. The decay of our flesh, the damnation of our souls, and the inescapable horror of simply being.
And yet, we cling. Like rats clutching flotsam in the midst of a storm, we mistake survival for meaning. But if the rats drown, it is not because they were destined to, but because they were never meant to swim. Likewise, we were never meant to grasp the whole.
Still, we persist, suffocating beneath the weight of our own delusions. Humanity is not a species of strength or enlightenment; it is a species of addicts. Addicts to illusion, apes clinging desperately to stories that explain away the chaos. And what are these stories but lies we tell ourselves to keep from screaming?
II
Imagine waking one morning and finding yourself erased. Not in the way that your body ceases to function, but in the unsettling way that your very essence has unraveled. Your limbs still move, your lungs still breathe, but your name, your history, your desires — gone, vanished like ash on an unmerciful wind. You stumble through the wreckage of memory, feeling the weight of existence but none of its tethering threads. Who are you now, if there’s no one to remember being you?
Such is the torment of dissociative fugue: the sudden and total amnesia of one’s identity. A life once lived becomes a haunting, and the self dissolves like a mirage under scrutiny. In this state, a man might walk a thousand miles, forging a new existence with no tether to the old. When confronted with his former life, he would deny it, as if asked to wear the face of a stranger. For the fugue’s victim, this is not loss but rebirth — a cruel baptism by the void.
But Cotard’s syndrome delves deeper, into the marrow of nonbeing. Consider the patient who claims she is already dead, a rotting husk of flesh wandering a world no longer hers. For her, mirrors reflect not an absence but a grotesque truth: she does not exist. No hunger stirs her belly, no warmth reaches her skin. The delusion is absolute, rendering her impervious to reason. And why should she believe? When the self unravels, reason is a feeble thread, unable to mend the gaping wound of existence.
These disorders, rare as they are, illuminate a universal fragility. Identity is not the bedrock we imagine but a thin crust over the magma of chaos. It is memory — that fickle, fallible narrator — that stitches together the illusion of continuity. Strip away memory, and the self crumbles. What remains? A body, yes. A heartbeat. But no more a person than a doll is its shadow.
The self is a hall of mirrors, endlessly reflecting fragments of perception. What you call “I” is no more than an echo chamber, a recursive loop of experience mistaking itself for solidity. Neuroscience lends credence to this grim poetry: studies show that our brains generate the sense of “self” milliseconds after decisions are already made. Free will, that cherished cornerstone of individuality, is a retrospective illusion. The self is an afterthought, a storyteller spinning tales to explain choices it never made.
What of memory, then? Surely that is the anchor of selfhood, the proof of a life lived. But memory is no archivist; it is a fiction writer, editing and embellishing to suit its whims. Psychological studies reveal how easily memories are planted, altered, or erased. A childhood trauma might be forgotten entirely, or worse, rewritten into joy. What does that say of the self built upon such shifting sands? If memory lies, then so does identity.
Strip it all away: memory, perception, the comforting lie of free will. What remains? A void. Not a void of despair, but a blank canvas — terrifying in its purity. This is the existential terror that disorders like Cotard’s and fugue unveil: the revelation that selfhood is not a gift but a trap, a construct clinging desperately to the illusion of permanence.
Why does the dissolution of self horrify us? Perhaps it’s because we equate identity with existence. To lose “I” feels like annihilation. Yet, if the self is an illusion, then what’s lost was never truly there. The terror, then, is not of loss but of exposure — a glimpse into the nothingness we’ve always been.
Consider the Buddhist concept of anattā, or “no-self.” Far from nihilism, it posits liberation. To abandon the self is to shed the burden of ego, to escape the endless grasping for identity and validation. It is a freedom most cannot bear, for it demands a confrontation with the void. But is the void not already here, hidden beneath the mask of “I”?
This is the paradox: to lose oneself is to find what lies beyond identity. The patient with Cotard’s syndrome and the monk seeking enlightenment are not so different. Both walk the edge of the abyss, staring into the hollowness within. One sees it as a curse, the other as a path to transcendence. Both are correct.
From this void arises the absurd — the tension between humanity’s yearning for meaning and the universe’s silence. The self, that fragile construct, is our primary weapon against absurdity. It shields us from the void with stories of purpose and continuity. Yet, as we’ve seen, the self is no more real than a shadow cast on fog. To confront the absurd, we must first dismantle the self, piece by piece, and accept the nothingness beneath.
But what then? What remains when the mask is torn away?
Here lies the bridge to the third part of Anti-Essence. The myth of self, once deconstructed, reveals the machinery of human existence. Identity is not a core but a narrative, not a truth but a tool. In the next step of this journey, we will dissect that narrative — the myths, constructs, and lies we cling to in our desperate attempt to stave off the void. For now, let us sit with the emptiness, neither fearing nor fleeing it, but acknowledging it as the foundation of all that we are and all that we are not.
III
What are you, really? Strip away the comforting veneer of identity — your name, your past, your ambitions. Remove the layers of memory and context, and what remains? Nothing but a trembling void. You are not a solid thing, not a core of essence wrapped in the fabric of personality. You are a story, a narrative that changes as easily as the weather. To claim otherwise is to cling to a myth — a delusion no different from Cotard’s negations or the fugue’s blank slate.
The ego is the grand illusion, the ultimate trick of evolution. Somewhere in the distant past, our ancestors developed the ability to tell themselves stories. They created characters and plots, heroes and villains, and in doing so, they created the self. It was an ingenious adaptation, a tool for survival. With it, they could plan, remember, and anticipate. They could band together, cooperate, and outwit the dangers of their chaotic world. But like all tools, it comes with a cost.
This tool, this self, became a prison. It shackles us to a relentless narrative, a story we are compelled to maintain at all costs. We are terrified of its unraveling, for to lose the self is to face the abyss. Yet the self was never real. It is a shadow cast by the mind, an epiphenomenon of consciousness, a trick of language and memory.
Consider the myriad ways the self can fracture, dissolve, or vanish altogether. Dissociative identity disorder divides one consciousness into many, each with its own story. Dissociative fugue erases the narrative entirely, leaving only a blank slate. And Cotard’s syndrome denies the story altogether, insisting on the impossibility of existence. These conditions are not aberrations but windows into the fragile and constructed nature of identity.
Even in so-called normal minds, the self is unstable. It shifts with mood and circumstance, molds itself to expectations, and reinvents itself in response to trauma. The self is a performance, a role we play for ourselves and others. It is a mask that changes with the scene, a fluid and ephemeral thing that only seems solid because we fear to look too closely.
But what happens when we strip away the mask? When we stop telling the story? What remains when the narrative collapses? The answer is unsettling: nothing. There is no core, no essence, no immutable “you” beneath the layers of illusion. There is only emptiness — and in that emptiness, freedom.
To confront the myth of self is to embrace the absurdity of existence. It is to see the ego for what it is: a useful fiction, a tool for navigating the chaos of life. But it is also a trap, a source of endless suffering as we cling to a thing that does not exist. The Buddhists call this clinging the root of all suffering, and they are not wrong. The self is a hungry ghost, forever seeking validation, meaning, and permanence in a world that offers none.
Yet to let go of the self is not to fall into despair. It is to awaken to the truth that life needs no story to be lived. Meaning is not something to be found but something to be created, moment by moment, without the burden of a central character. The absence of self is not a loss but a liberation, a chance to exist as part of the chaotic, beautiful, indifferent whole.
You are not a being; you are becoming. You are not a thing; you are a process. The river does not cling to its water, and neither should you cling to your self. Let it flow, let it dissolve, and in its place, find the infinite possibility of the void.
The myth of self is a comfort, a cage, a lie we tell to stave off the terror of nothingness. But the nothingness is where we came from and where we will return. It is not an enemy; it is home.
And here lies the bridge to the unflinching truth: if identity is a lie, then so is our pursuit of meaning. To confront the void without the armor of selfhood is to confront suffering in its rawest form. Life is not a quest for purpose but a grotesque theater of decay, where the illusions of permanence and progress only serve to obscure the relentless pull of entropy. The next step is not liberation but revelation — to stare into the abyss and recognize it as both the stage and the script.
We are but trembling actors in a play without audience or applause, clutching at the tatters of identity to shield ourselves from the void’s unblinking gaze. Yet, as the curtain begins to fall, we must ask: who writes the final act, and what remains when the stage goes dark?
Who are we sincerely when the curtain falls?
IV
We are rotting meat puppets, puppeteered by a desperate, masochistic yearning for the void — a void whose icy embrace we both crave and dread. Life is not a gift, not even a curse; it is a grotesque joke told by a blind universe to a deaf audience. We clutch at it with trembling fingers, not because it is precious, but because it is all we have to shield us from the unrelenting terror of nothingness. This is no indulgent nihilism masquerading as profundity. It is the mirror held up to existence, reflecting the one unyielding truth: suffering is the marrow of life. From the first gasp of air, we scream — not in innocence, not in protest, but in the cold, ancestral recognition of our cosmic condemnation.
We are born not to live but to decay. Life is not a journey or a lesson; it is a prolonged execution. The starving mystic who muttered, “life is suffering,” eons ago was no prophet — he was merely murmuring the inescapable reality that every homesick cadaver knows but refuses to admit. His so-called enlightenment was no revelation; it was the vomit-stained note pinned to the door of the madhouse, written in the blood of a truth too vile to stomach.
And what do we, these conscious carcasses, do with this truth? Nothing. We suffocate it beneath layers of glittering delusions and self-deceit. If we were honest — if we had even a shred of sincerity — we would throw ourselves headlong into the flames of annihilation. But honesty is punished in this world, and sincerity is mocked as the folly of fools. Those who truly search for meaning end up nailed to a cross before 300 shabbily dressed Romans or whispering secrets to a horse in the street.
Sincerity is the gravest sin in this carnival of masks. Those who dare to peel away the charade are not celebrated — they are crucified, their revelations dismissed as the ramblings of lunatics too weak to play the game. Truth is a poison that kills all who sip it. And we, the spectators, do not mourn them. We mock them, dissect them, display their shattered lives as carnival oddities, all while cowering behind our lies.
But let us not flatter ourselves. We are not martyrs or seekers. We are carrion feeders, scuttling through the ruins of civilizations built on lies, our bloated egos fed on the corpses of ideals we lack the courage to embrace. Strip away the gilded veils of our so-called progress, and you will find beasts with better tools, clawing at each other with smiles painted in blood.
Every act of kindness is a transaction, every word a betrayal, every handshake a subtle declaration of war. The only honesty left in the world lies in the guttural cries of beasts, untainted by the rancid sophistication of human deceit. We are not better than animals; we are worse. No lion slaughters for sport, no vulture plucks the eyes of its kin for a fleeting taste of power. Only man, the self-proclaimed pinnacle of creation, revels in cruelty for its own sake, glorying in the suffering he inflicts on all around him.
Our toil is the cruelest joke of all. Unlike Sisyphus, we are not bound by chains or curses. We push the rock not because we must but because we lack the courage to let it crush us. The struggle defines us, though it means nothing. The absurdity is our anthem, and the weight of our self-imposed burden becomes the hollow core of our identity. We could let go. We could stop. But we do not. We will not. We are too craven to face the stillness, too vain to admit the futility of our labor.
So we stumble forward, not as martyrs, not as heroes, but as parasites gnawing on the rotting carcass of meaning. We are not noble. We are not transcendent. We are the bleakest farce the cosmos has ever devised: self-aware meat, rotting in the sunshine, arrogant enough to call its decay “life.” We do not rise above; we cannot transcend. We are the architects of our own misery, creatures with just enough awareness to suffer and just enough cowardice to refuse the peace of the grave.
We could end it. We could release ourselves from this grotesque performance. But we are too addicted to our own suffering, too enamored with the sound of our wretched, meaningless screams. We are prisoners who hold the key but cling to the bars, terrified of the freedom we claim to seek. We are not homesick for the grave — we are terrified of it. And so we will rot here, architects of our own eternal torment, refusing the silence we so desperately crave.
Mahmoud Maher Eltrawy, who publishes under the pseudonym Titoxz, is a medical graduate from Egypt, and his background informs my exploration of psychology, philosophy, and storytelling. His work aims to provoke introspection, offering readers an unflinching lens through which to examine their own understanding of existence.
Header art by Lexi Jude.
